The Millennial-Industrial Complex

In all the fighting over the Obamacare rollout, two points of consensus have emerged. One is that the law’s success among young people will be crucial to its legacy. The other is that the Millennials are a generation whose political loyalties are as yet unsettled.

Of course, the deep-pocketed message massagers on all sides of the political spectrum aren’t interested in letting young people figure things out for themselves. Into the battle for the hearts of minds of the youth have come, among others, the liberal ProgressNow and the conservative Generation Opportunity—a Koch brothers-funded concern that, like its progressive counterpart, is spending lavishly to influence Millennials. To put things optimistically, the results have been mixed.

ProgressNow, which receives funding from a number of labor unions and progressive foundations, tried to get young people interested in the president’s health insurance by running ads featuring a young man with no pants gargoyle-ing on top of a keg. Another of the group’s marketing efforts featured a young lady celebrating the fact that her Obamacare birth control would free her up to focus on getting a total hottie into bed. The ads were panned as tryhard at best, if not downright condescending.

An Internet ad produced by the Kochs’s Generation Opportunity featured a larger-than-life Uncle Sam mascot, menacingly poised to attack a young woman’s vagina in a doctor’s office. Meant to lambaste the president’s health law, it was an odd image—especially given that so much opposition to the Affordable Care Act has been engendered by a crowd of conservatives hoping to mandate transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. The Daily Show skewered both campaigns.

Though you could be forgiven for reading these episodes as proof that the political apparatuses on both the left and the right have no idea whatsoever how to reach anyone under 30, these ads are in fact part of an intricately organized and long-established war for the political loyalties of the young—a battle on which more than $100 million a year is spent, according to a 2012 report. “There’s a whole world of shadow politics,” said conservative activist David Horowitz, a zealous campus crusader in his own right.

But clearly, much of the vast youth-industrial complex is having a tough time figuring out this new generation of voters. And while left and right spend heavily in efforts that may or may not be working, and political scientists theorize about a generation that’s simply more allergic than their predecessors to America’s traditional right/left political divide, the real momentum among Millennials are those whose politics skew young and libertarian. Fueled by a new array of activist groups, they’ve found a receptive audience amidst a generation suspicious of foreign military adventures, celebratory of live-your-own-way diversity and devout in its enthusiasm for the market. In just four years, the 20-point edge in party identification that Democrats enjoyed among 18-24-year-olds in November 2009 has shrunk to six points. Since 2008, the largest youth libertarian group has grown from nonexistence to a network of 162,000 activists. Perhaps it’s not so much that the kids don’t trust anyone over 30—but that they don’t trust any political coalition over 10.

The idea that young people are a permanent Democratic constituency is a cultural myth seared into the American consciousness by the generational strife of the 1960s. It was never really true. Even in 1972, as the Vietnam War wound on, Richard Nixon handily won voters under 30 (albeit by a much narrower margin than his overall blowout of George McGovern). Over the next three decades, the youth vote held to this pattern: It was in fact the American vote. Sure, younger voters tilted a few points away from Ronald Reagan in 1980 and a few points toward Bill Clinton in 1996, but otherwise they voted for presidents in lockstep with the rest of the electorate.

That began to change as Millennials—the approximately 80 million Americans born between the early 1980s and the very first years of the 21st century—entered the voting ranks. In 2004, John Kerry fared six points better among young voters than the general electorate. In 2006, the youth vote propelled the Democratic wave that won the party back the House, and in 2008, the energetic support of Millennials helped boost Barack Obama to the presidency. He won two-thirds of young voters, compared to just over half the total vote. Youth turnout reached its highest level since 1992.

But Obama’s success wasn’t the only development among young voters in 2008. That year, septuagenarian Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s niche candidacy in the Republican primary struck a surprisingly strong chord with libertarian-minded college students who were disillusioned with the presidency of George W. Bush but culturally or intellectually disinclined to get on board with Obama. When the dust had settled on Paul’s candidacy, two new youth organizations had sprung up: Young Americans for Liberty and Students for Liberty.

In fact, you could argue that the rapid growth of these libertarian groups has been the real story of campus politics in the Obama era. With the formal blessing of Ron Paul, YAL has grown to 162,000 “activists” spread across 500 chapters, including 7,000 dues-paying members. Yes, thousands of the same kids who steal Netflix from their friends rather than pay $8 a month for unlimited entertainment pay dues to a libertarian political club. That stands in stark contrast to the old-guard campus organizations on the left and the right that have long fought for the attention and enthusiasm of college kids by paying students in retreats, grants, fellowships and well-compensated internships.

Ben Schreckinger is a freelance writer based in Boston. Follow him @SchreckReports.